“Bringing players together as United Forces in larger numbers offers multiple benefits to players, first of which is the ease of jumping into multiplayer activities,” explains BioWare. “Once the United Forces update is live, any group activity you would want to participate in will have a much larger volume of players queueing at any time that you are looking to play, including Operations, Flashpoints, PvP Warzones, Uprisings, and Galactic Starfighter battles. Communities of players, such as role-players, will have more like-minded players to join and play alongside. Plus, server-wide activities, such as Conquests, will have more fierce competition than ever before.”

There’s a chance you’ll lose your names, note, as subbers have priority to keep their names on the new server, followed by characters with more playtime. “To limit the challenge of duplicated names we will proactively remove names from characters that have not been played within the past 90-days or more and which are below Level 10,” the studio warns. It’ll also allow up to 52 characters per server and ensure that your highest legacy levels are maintained. Guild names are unaffected this time.

The studio has also put out its fall roadmap, noting that GU 5.5 (now called United Forces Foundation) is still slated for October 10th, followed by United Forces Formation on October 24th, the actual merges on November 8th, 5.6: A Traitor Among the Chiss on November 28th, and 5.6.1 and the anniversary celebration on December 12th.

Lead Game Producer Keith Kanneg also mentions adjusting galactic command experience – for the better. “CXP for all areas of the game is in review,” he says. “As some players experienced with the Planetary Daily Areas, increased CXP makes us happier, so that’s our plan for all areas throughout the game and will coincide with A Traitor Among the Chiss update.”

I’ve had my character names since early access and gave them a fair amount of money over the years. If a subber takes the name of my main characters, EA/Bioware will not have another dime of my money. Ever.

Damn idiots, you aren’t giving me much reason to sub and little reason to play when I’m absent. Can play a better game for way less, like Destiny 2.

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1 year ago

Reader

mysecretid

I didn’t stop subscribing to Star Wars: The Old Republic because I dislike the basic flavor of the game, I did it to “vote with my money”, as the saying goes — to do the only thing in my power that I could do to show EA that I am significantly unhappy with the current state of the game.

And now, they’re effectively blackmailing players into subscribing if they wish to keep their character names? Yeah.

You know, I play a number of MMORPGs which tie character names to a player’s account (Star Trek Online, for one), so that it’s possible for the game to have multiple players with characters named “Bree Royce” with no problems.

As others have said, creating a situation where I either resume paying up, or risk losing my characters’ names just adds to the list of reasons why I stopped subscribing.

Even though I like the essential game behind it all, I continue to have increasing issues with how things are run, and how customers are treated.

My opinions, anyway.

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1 year ago

Reader

thirtymil

“Bree Royce” does actually sound like a Star Wars name… :)

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1 year ago

Reader

Jeremy Barnes

as someone who subbed to the game, the thing that really annoyed me was their stupid *ss f2p model. You know what will increase people doing multiplayer activities? Letting free or “premiere” players do multiplayer activities.

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1 year ago

Reader

Jack Pipsam

To be honest I basically stopped playing SW:TOR when they closed down the native Australian servers. From 45 ping to over 300, well I was like “screw you” and quit. Oh, Sydney hosted servers were so nice, buttery smooth, even Planetside 2 still has one. Not like EA doesn’t host a billion other game servers here. Still quite bitter about it.

However 2 American servers, yesh. Hope one is at least West Coast for any remaining ANZ players.

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1 year ago

Reader

Cadaver

Yeah, the APACS-RP server was my home in that game. I was an active, engaged and subscribing player when they shut it down. I lasted less than 15 minutes on whatever US server my characters were transferred to (minus their names, of course). I loved the game but I never went back.

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1 year ago

Reader

Estranged

Jack, I’m sorry. That really stinks.

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1 year ago

Reader

Witches

I see this backfiring badly, well not too badly i guess the population of the bigger servers will rise ever so slightly, but i can see some of the high spenders on RP servers not being too thrilled and quitting over this.

Also you left out an extremely important piece of information, one server will be…Hot Prospect, sure it’s lore, but so is bantha poodoo.

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1 year ago

Reader

Brandon Matthews

First the ludicrously awful plot of the whole Eternal Empire gets even MORE insultingly stupid in KOTET and now this? Sigh. I really really can’t bring myself to ever say I’m truly done with this game because I like the characters I made, I really like the story content up until KOTFE starts, and it’s Star Wars. But if i lose my character names….AGAIN…..I don’t think I can get past that.

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1 year ago

Reader

traja

Chances are that the majority of players won’t even notice this. MMO players like to stack servers so most should already be in the few big servers that are left. It’s the stubborn few who still play small servers that are affected by this.
Even WoW should really be merging servers already. It is insane how many low population servers there are, and only a couple servers are big enough to sometimes get a few seconds of queue time over the weekend. But that would be a PR nightmare for Blizzard to admit so they just do cross-realm for everything.

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1 year ago

Reader

Paarthurnax Dragonhearth

Translation : …’ we don’t got no more people … so now we merge them servers up , so you and us can pretend we got’s more people ! ‘

…. We need a MMO purge …. and then some actual game designers to take over the IP’s and make a REAL mmo ….. The time for WoW style gameplay is over … it’s been 10 + years ….. evolve …. do something …. not Black Desert ( AFK GRIND – A – TON ) or Kickstarted pieces of retro dream poop ! …… Wake up ya dummy’s …. this ain’t gaming …. it’s wasting your time on sub-par games …..

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1 year ago

Reader

BigAngry

Oh please, if people enjoy something, don’t tell them they’re wasting their time.

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1 year ago

Reader

Open_Mind66

Hopefully when this game finally crashes and burns some one will be allowed to make a new Star Wars Galaxies mmo.

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1 year ago

Reader

Hunam85

I think it’s high time that I get on and complete all the class stories, I’m really not sure how long this game is going to be around.

I can agree on the name situation though, unique names with non-unique Legacy names is the wrong way around. My main, and the only one who’s name I actually care about, has a huge playtime, so I’m not worried about losing it.

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1 year ago

Reader

connor_jones

Good luck with that. I mean, at least for me KOTFE totally ruined those great original class stories. Not only are they now largely irrelevant from a lore/story perspective, worse, they became laughably easy. I can remember a time before KOTFE dropped when on more than one occasion I was bit low on cash and had to skimp on gear, and it made for some very tough boss fights. Now, however, the bosses talk big about how they’re going to squash you and all after which you proceed to down them with a couple of hits. So sad. :(